ICGA Journal - Volume 34, issue 2

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ISSN 1389-6911 (P)

ISSN
2468-2438 (E)

Impact Factor 2019: 0.500

The ICGA Journal provides an international forum for computer games researchers presenting new results on ongoing work. The editors invite contributors to submit papers on all aspects of research related to computers and games. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

(1) the current state of game-playing programs for classic and modern board and card games(2) the current state of virtual, casual and video games(3) new theoretical developments in game-related research, and (4) general scientific contributions produced by the study of games.

Also welcome is research on topics such as:
(5) social aspects of computer games
(6) cognitive research of how humans play games
(7) capture and analysis of game data, and
(8) issues related to networked games are invited to submit their contributions.

Abstract: Establishing heuristic-search based chess programs as appropriate tools for estimating human skill levels at chess may seem impossible due to the following issues: the programs’ evaluations and decisions tend to change with the depth of search and with the program used. In this research, we provide an analysis of the differences between heuristic-search based programs in estimating chess skill. We used four different chess programs to perform analyses of large data sets of recorded human decisions, and obtained very similar rankings of skill-based performances of selected chess players using any of these programs at various levels of search. A conclusion…is that, given two chess players, all the programs unanimously rank one player to be clearly stronger than the other, or all the programs assess their strengths to be similar. We also repeated our earlier analysis with the program CRAFTY of the human World Chess Champions with currently one of the strongest chess programs, RYBKA 32 , and obtained qualitatively very similar results as with CRAFTY . This speaks in favour of computer heuristic search being adequate for estimating skill levels of chess players, despite the above stated issues.
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Abstract: Van der Heijden’s ENDGAME STUDY DATABASE IV, HHDB IV, is the definitive collection of 76,132 chess studies. The zugzwang position or zug , one in which the side to move would prefer not to, is a frequent theme in the literature of chess studies. In this third data-mining of HHDB IV, we report on the occurrence of sub-7-man zugs there as discovered by the use of CQL and Nalimov endgame tables (EGTs). We also mine those Zugzwang Studies in which a zug more significantly appears in both its White-to-move (wtm) and Black-to-move (btm) forms. We provide…some illustrative and extreme examples of zugzwangs in studies.
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